The Practical Application
You might be wondering what the point of all this is. After all, isn’t it just plainly obvious that the American Resistance movement is fighting the good fight? I of course agree. But there is a difference between knowing that something is obvious and knowing why it’s obvious.
What I’ve attempted to do here is to carve out a foundation for thinking about unjust laws, civil disobedience, resistance, and insurgency, so that when it comes to the cases that are not so obvious, we have a way of approaching them.
When we look at these issues within the imaginary universe of the Man in the High Castle, we can get a sharper picture of the way we naturally think about right and wrong.
13
But Why Is Our World Better?
TIM JONES
When our leading lady Juliana writes back to Frank from the Neutral Zone, she’s pretty clear that the images she’s seen in the newsreels show not just “another world” but “a better world.”
This belief is what led her to abandon her partner and family. It’s what leads her to put her life in the hands of strangers and risk murder by undercover assassins and psychotic bounty hunters like the Marshall. And given that it concerns a world where the Third Reich is a distant memory, this belief might be perfectly understandable no matter how much danger it brings her way, not only to her but to myself as a viewer and, I’d imagine, to the vast majority of my readers too. But what if she’s wrong?
Imagine living in a reality so horrible that your only hope is a mysterious series of videos that promise an alternative world where the source of your problems never happened. A video that offers you a way out through showing that life could’ve happened differently. That life can still happen differently, since this other world might even exist, just beyond a thin threshold separating it from your own nightmarish realm. This video would probably be the most important thing you’d ever heard of and you might even devote your life to tracking down as many copies as you could find, to make sure they got out there into the world for all the other people suffering like you to watch and be inspired by.
“Hang on a sec,” you might well be thinking right now. “Isn’t this just the premise of the show? It’s about a bunch of people in a parallel version of America, hunting down film reels showing a wonderful alternative reality where the Nazis lost World War II and the Allies won. Is this guy just going to repeat the plot of what I’ve already watched?”
Yes and no. I’m not actually referring to the specific situation in the show itself, but a mirror of the show’s central plot that could exist in the world you and I live in right now.
Imagine an alternative version not of our history, but of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Imagine a series of newsreels secreted throughout our world that show the Allies losing and the united forces of Germany and Japan winning and occupying the United States. And imagine how normal, regular folk like you or I might very easily come to see these film reels exactly like Juliana sees the Grasshopper reels. As their only beacon of hope in a living nightmare. A beacon for a better world.
Good Guys and Bad Guys
I’d not be surprised if the majority of you think that I’m starting with a pretty indefensible premise. Our world is the world in which the Nazis lost. They’re the ones who gassed tens of thousands of disabled Germans to death and then engineered the Holocaust, who murdered entire villages of innocent Czechoslovakians in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhardt Heydrich, to name just two of their numerous atrocities. How can I possibly imagine any right-meaning folk in our reality dreaming of their having won the war? I’d bet you’re thinking that if anyone you knew in this world celebrated the existence of a video showing a reality where the people behind these atrocities were victorious, then at best you’d want nothing more to do with them. At worst you might punch them in the face.
The show itself works to encourage the incredulity you might be feeling at what I’m suggesting now. It’s not just Juliana who’s pretty clear that the images she’s seen in the film-reels show “a better world.” The huge smile that Trade Minister Tagomi has throughout his trip to the world of the newsreels in the closing moments of Season One shows how strongly he’d agree with her. And I reckon the smile is for more than just his family being alive there, as we find out in Season Two.
Throughout Season One, he’s shown to be a far more sympathetic guy than the rest of the ruling Japanese. Witness his apology to Juliana in “Truth” for the violence of the Kempeitai and his refusal to sacrifice Rudolf Wegener to meet his goals for a nuclear Pacific States. Even this goal (the only real black mark against his softer nature) attests in part to his character, since he sees it as the only means by which the Japanese Pacific States can be secure from an otherwise inevitable German attack. It’s a defensive necessity, rather than a weapon of attack. Before you denounce his nuclear ambitions, consider that the reason that the Germans cancel their attack on Japan in “Fallout” is their believing that the Japanese possess a Hydrogen bomb. Sure, this might be a hydrogen bomb that the Germans don’t realize is actually from an alternative future, but peace between the two nations enduring because of the presence of weapons of mass destruction ironically backs up Tagomi’s genuine belief in their necessity for his country’s security.
So the good guys of the show prefer our world to their own. The only people in the show who’d disagree with Juliana or Tagomi on this are people that the majority of the audience would recognize as “the bad guys”—SS or Kempeitai agents who torture prisoners to death, for example. Or antique shop owner Robert Childan, who’s at best a casual racist and is happy with what happened to the Jews. So the people whom the show wants us to root for desire the world shown in the Grasshopper reels, while the people we hiss at would much prefer their status quo, thank you very much.
None of this is that surprising, right? When we look at what the Nazis got up to before and during the Second World War, it’s easy to see that a future under their control would be a living hell for anyone who cherishes democracy, human rights and personal freedom over a totalitarian dictatorship. (If you’re reading this and would prefer to live under Nazi occupation because their manifesto just sounds totally swell—you might be one of the two hundred people who The Atlantic tells us gathered at an alt-right conference in Washington and celebrated Trump’s election victory with Nazi salutes—then I’m personally sorry on your behalf that you don’t live in Juliana’s reality instead of our own. You’d love it there.)
But my own horror at the world that the Nazis could have created doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for me to imagine a person who I’d be happy hanging out with hating the fact that our reality is the one they’re forced to live with. And even if you share my view that Nazis = bad news, I bet that if you spoke to these people with an open mind, you might even end up understanding exactly where they’re coming from.
Better for Whom Exactly?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m writing this chapter in an English city called Norwich (roughly in the middle of the big bit that bulges out to the East, about half-way up). When I’m not playing at being an academic, I work at Norwich City Hall. Hitler desperately wanted to invade England during the early stages of the Second World War and rumor has it that plans for the occupation were so advanced that he’d already scheduled a victory speech from Norwich City Hall’s balcony, to deliver to his newly conquered people sometime in the summer of 1942.
When I watch the show, I like to imagine that Wolf Muser’s Hitler actually did this and still pops over to my city of residence from time to time. He’d love the market. In the real world, I’m incredibly glad that he never got the opportunity. If he had, then I could’ve grown up in one of many territories of the Third Reich and life would likely have been horrible. If I lived in the world of the show, I’d definitely be siding with Juliana and Tagomi in preferring the world of the Grasshopper newsreels.
But here’s some stuff that’s also pretty horrible and that happen
ed in our world, the world that Juliana and Tagomi would rather live in. In the world that I would rather live in and which the majority of people reading this chapter would probably rather live in too:
•In April 1945, the Soviet Army invaded the German capital Berlin, leading towards Hitler’s suicide on April 30th. While this in itself would be an entirely reasonable part of their counterattack against the Nazis, the actions of its soldiers towards German civilians were often not. Civilian casualties are estimated at 125,000. It’s also estimated that 100,000 German women were raped by Red Army soldiers, many of them multiple times, by multiple men.
•On August 6th 1945 the US air force dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, they dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki. Over 200,000 Japanese people are estimated to have died across both attacks. The argument goes that more civilians would’ve died as a result of the war dragging on, had the US not taken this unprecedented step. The lingering effects of the radiation across the following decades have been held accountable for numerous cases of birth defects and cancer in survivors.
•At the end of the Potsdam Conference on 2nd August 1945 it was officially decreed that all German residents of Czechoslovakia could be forcibly deported from that country, in retaliation for the actions committed during the Nazi occupation throughout the war. Many of these German residents and their familial ancestors had been living in Czechoslovakia long before the Nazis’ rise to power. It’s conservatively estimated that around 15,000 people died during the expulsions. German residents were also interred in concentration camps. Czech President Edvard Beneš didn’t seem to care about these potential similarities to the actions of his country’s occupiers when he called in October for a “final solution” to the Czechs’ “German problem.”
I’m definitely not trying to convince you that both sides are as bad as each other—I’m not sure that would be useful, even if it were remotely possible. But imagine being one of the German women who suffered at the hands of the Russians (and who then would live the rest of her life in the Soviet-controlled East Germany); imagine being one of the residents of Hiroshima dying a lingering death as a result of an illness caused by the bombs, or nursing a child deformed for the same reason; and imagine being one of the innocent Germans uprooted from his or her home in Czechoslovakia, purely for having the wrong genetic background.
These hypothetical people would live in our world as perfectly nice, lovely folk who want the best for everyone they know; entirely tolerant and unprejudiced towards minorities. Not brutal torturers like the Kempeitai’s Chief Inspector Kido, or casual racists like Robert Childan, who’d both clearly prefer to live in the show’s own reality because it allows their baser characteristics to be indulged. They could be your neighbours and you’d never think a single bad thought about them. They’d live a normal life as much as they could, carrying the huge physical and emotional burdens forced onto them by the historical events of this world, fighting every day not to let it grind them down.
I reckon that if one of them were to stumble upon a newsreel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy that shows the Axis forces winning the war—and if this person then copied Juliana and wrote a letter to his or her partner gushing about having seen on this reel “a better world”—it would be entirely understandable.
A Worse World
So it’s possible that sympathetic people in our reality might disagree with Juliana’s faithful description of the world in the Grasshopper newsreels as “better”—and that if these people were to find reels of their own, then they might just as readily assign Juliana’s evaluation to the world it would show them, in which the Allied powers were defeated by Germany and Japan. We shouldn’t simply dismiss these people as evil, since they’ve lived through horrible events in our timeline and so their longing for the world they see in our world’s equivalent of the Grasshopper reels would deserve our understanding and empathy. It would be a world in which they could live without carrying the legacy of sexual violence, terminal illness or forced displacement.
But even though I’d not condemn any of these people, I’m still incredibly glad that I live in this world and not Juliana’s. I agree with her pretty much unconditionally that the world she sees in the film reels is “better” than her own. And I bet you do too, even if you agree with what I’ve just said.
Is this simply because it’s extremely unlikely that anyone reading this book will have experienced any of the historical events I mentioned earlier? Perhaps. That’d mean that my agreeing with Juliana comes from an element of privilege I get just from my own country having been on the winning side of the war. None of the bad things happened to me, not because our version of history is unconditionally great for everyone involved, but because I’m lucky enough not to have lived in any of the situations I described. I’m not a woman who lived in Berlin during the Russians’ occupation, nor a resident of Hiroshima, nor a displaced Czechoslovakian German. If I hadn’t been so lucky to have avoided any of these fates through the sheer lottery of birth, then I might well find Juliana’s perspective on which world is best harder to agree with.
A Better World for the Most People
But I’m not entirely happy with the conclusion that thinking our own world superior to the world of the show is entirely down to the thinker’s good fortune. To say that one bunch of people suffer in one version of history while another bunch of people suffer in the other, and that any evaluation that one world is “better” than the other depends entirely on which bunch you happen to belong to. One of the main reasons for my dissatisfaction with this line of thinking is the fact that one bunch is almost certainly way bigger than the other.
Without being ghoulish enough to count up every single victim, it’s highly likely that many more people across the world suffered in Juliana’s version of history during and following the Second World War. At least two of the horrible events from our world that I described earlier will have comparable incidents in her reality. The alternative world of the show has its own equivalent of Hiroshima, when a German atomic bomb called the Heisenberg Device was dropped on Washington D.C, just like we see in a flashback in “Fallout” at the end of Season Two. So in Juliana’s world there’d be an equivalent group of people to the Japanese survivors I described earlier, who’ve suffered equivalent trauma. The psychological trauma for America as a whole could conceivably have been even worse than it was for Japan, considering the impact of the capital itself being attacked in this horrifying new way. And going by real-world evidence about the actions of the German SS units in Russia towards the women they encountered there in the early 1940s (in blatant contradiction to their own supposed codes of “racial purity”), I can’t imagine that the German’s subsequent occupation of American cities would’ve been any less terrifying than the Soviets’ occupation of Berlin.
Added to these equivalents of the people in our reality who might reasonably long for Juliana’s version of history, we have the people subjected to fresh brutalities as a result of the Nazis’ victory that don’t have an obvious parallel here. The TV show hasn’t gone into too much detail about what happened to the rest of the world after the war, but if you read Philip K. Dick’s original novel, there’s lots of hints about how the brutality the Nazis showed towards the Jews was directed towards new targets following their victory, including the extermination of most of Africa. And thanks to the Nazi rule consolidating itself across Europe and the Americas, millions more people in Juliana’s present live under the daily stresses of totalitarian rule than do so in our world.
Sure, there’s places today like North Korea where life for regular folk is comparable to life for Americans and Europeans under the Nazis. A United Nations report in 2014 on human rights in North Korea, written after listening to over 320 testimonies, including those from prison camp survivors and former guards, concluded that the regime employs “systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations” in order to “dominate every aspect of its citize
ns’ lives and terrorize them from within” (United Nations Human Rights Council). It’s fair to say though that the extent of totalitarianism’s reach is far more limited in our world than in hers. Life in Soviet Russia was pretty horrible under Stalin, but he died in 1953 and none of the following Soviet leaders were anything like as hell-bent on mass murder as he was. Much of Russia gets destroyed in Juliana’s reality anyway, so I think it’s pretty unproblematic to argue that this part of the world has a relatively easier time of it in our reality than in hers.
Since 1945, the United Nations has worked in our world to foster human rights and prevent another outbreak of world war. It’s definitely not perfect and has missed opportunities where it could have saved many, many lives, particularly in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, but it’s much better than the status quo in the show, where the peace that exists seems likely to collapse the moment Hitler dies. The best thing that can be said in the regime’s favor is that everyone is safe from another world war as long as Hitler stays alive and well—which is a pretty shocking point of reassurance, if you think about it!
So Juliana’s world has its own equivalents of many of the people who suffer as a result of our version of history, as well as millions more whose suffering is a direct result of that world’s own historical events happening instead of ours. This is one quantifiable, if perhaps a little cold, way of suggesting that Juliana would be objectively correct to say that the world you and I live in right now is “better” than her own. Even if her evaluation is motivated by how she imagines her own life would have turned out differently, it’s not just Juliana who’d personally suffer far less as a result of history running the way it has for us, but a greater number of people overall across the world.
Whether or not Juliana and I agree over which world is best because we’d both be better off here than in her reality, the numbers are on our side either way.
The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy Page 14